Brian Boje

From the Hangar Floor to the Recruiting Floor

Boje came up on the shop side of aviation. He was an aircraft painter first, then a contractor, and the company he contracted for is the company he leads recruiting for today. That path matters to how he hires. He knows what the work smells like, what a technician is being asked to do, and what it means to a family when a placement lands well or badly.

He also knows what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a recruiter's call. "I was on the other side of the telephone," he says, and the promise he made himself when he crossed over has held for three decades: the job was never going to be just about numbers. It was going to be about relationships that lasted. The proof is in his voicemail. Boje still hears from tradespeople who call him for work thirty years after he first placed them, and who sing his praises to anyone who will listen. He calls that the greatest thing about the job.

The List Is Long

Asked who shaped him, Boje answers the same way three times: "That list is long." Then he goes through it, name by name.

TJ Scott was his first trainer, the one who brought him in and gave him what he calls a great foundation. Boje has now worked with him, for him and alongside him for almost thirty years. Phil Anson Sr. was the president who hired him, and the model he tried to emulate: a man who started as an aircraft mechanic and worked his way up to president and then owner of STS. Phil Anson Jr., his son, is now CEO of STS Aviation Group. Mark Smith came up through sales as VP and became president of the company, another example of the internal climb Boje clearly admires.

Two more names arrived through acquisition. After September 2001 sent aviation backward, STS Services Incorporated, then purely an aviation staffing firm, made a deliberate decision to diversify its holdings so the business was neither staffing only nor aviation only. One of those purchases was TAC Worldwide, a technical services company that came with its own leadership. Rick Koenig, TAC's president, became a mentor in the truest sense. "Rick's been around the block and he learned a lot," Boje says, "and the great thing about Rick, he didn't mind sharing what he learned." TAC's vice president, Chuck Harrison, is STS's current president.

Boje is just as quick to point at people coming up beside him. He names Billy Cook, vice president of sales and client solutions, as someone who deserves more recognition, precisely because the two of them refuse to let the usual wall between sales and recruiting get built. He names Adam D. Nugent, his recruiting manager in Manchester. And he names, with an admitted bias he makes no apology for, a recruiter at Spencer Ogden who happens to be his daughter, Alyssa Boje, who by his account has been killing it.

A Whole Bag of Clubs

On artificial intelligence, Boje has heard this argument before, in a different costume. When text messaging arrived, the industry insisted it was too impersonal and that candidates should not be texted. Now text is how most candidates prefer to communicate, while the phone call remains the place where the actual selling happens. His conclusion is unsentimental. Recruiters who refuse each new technology get left behind.

His favorite framing comes from the film Tin Cup, in which a golfer takes on a round with a single seven iron. "You can play a round of golf with a seven iron, but you just can't play it as well," he says. Recruiting tools work the same way. One tool will not stop you from succeeding. It will stop you from succeeding as much as you could. AI, in his view, is simply another club in the bag, and used appropriately it makes recruiters more effective rather than obsolete.

He is careful, though, about the sequencing. Boje has demoed plenty of products and evaluated plenty of promises, and his standard is practical rather than theoretical.

Get the Buy-In from the Floor

Ask him what talent leaders should carry into 2027 and Boje starts by lowering the temperature. The fundamentals of recruiting are not going to change, he argues. The tools and how we use them will. So stay open to new ideas, and vet what you buy.

Then comes the part he clearly cares most about. "It doesn't matter what I think is effective or not, it's a matter of whether my recruiters will adopt it," he says. Leaders who sit up top buying tools because they look fun, or because a slide promises ROI, are spending money on nothing. "It only makes them effective if they're going to use it." The buy-in has to come from the recruiters on the floor doing the job, or the purchase is just time and budget out the door.

The same realism shows up in how he coaches. Recruiting, he tells anyone who will listen, is a mentality and a state of mind, because rejection will always outnumber the yes. "You learn from the losses, but you focus on the wins," he says. "If you focus on the negatives, recruiting's not for you." Thirty years in, with candidates still calling and a list of mentors he can recite from memory, Boje has earned the right to say it.